Torren' Up Cards

I didn't spend a lot of time in the 2010's watching TV. Whatever I did watch probably wasn't what other people were watching. Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Black Mirror, 80% of Netflix in general, I avoided all of these things like the plague. Mainly because I just do not like live action. I'm stuck with real people 24/7, the fuck would I want to spend my free time looking at more real people who I'd want to punch for cutting me off in traffic?


Of course there were exceptions but in the 2010's my TV consumption was pretty much on par with how it was in the 2000's.


The 2010's were a time where all of the cartoons I grew up with were long gone but in their place emerged a bunch of amazing new cartoons that were honestly much better than a lot of the cartoons I grew up with.

So yeah, this post is going to be about all of the awesome cartoons that most adults didn't watch because you'd all rather watch some boring shit like the Handmaiden's Tale or something called "The Office". You wack heathens. Also I'm going to avoid cartoons people might've actually heard of like Rick & Morty because, well, I'd rather give the spotlight to shows that never got enough of it.

Let's go at it by channels/distributors.


Still my go-to channel after all of these years.



I was super late to getting on the AT train and by the time I got on it the show was over. But I think it's super important to mention AT because it's emergence signaled the beginning of the 2010's in western animation. The style, the animation, the storyline that served to develop the lore and build backstories. This show set the tone for a lot of cartoons to come in the 2010's and it's probably thanks to Finn and Jake's adventures that I would later get other cartoons I really enjoy.



The references in this show make it clear that this is made by an 80's kid for 80's kids, but the core theme of being a young 20-something who is fresh out of college and still trying to figure out their way into adulthood speaks to even a 2000's kid like me. Actually I'm pretty sure I was the core demographic for the show because it was a borderline stoner cartoon that's a few more edits away from being a Adult Swim cartoon. But luckily it was still innocent enough to stay a distilled and honestly refined Cartoon Network cartoon instead of some wack AS shit that tries way too hard.



In the mid 2010's Cartoon Network released a bunch of pilots for what looked like great cartoon shows and one of the ones that really struck me was Infinity Train. A story about a teenage girl who is trapped on an infinite train and must make her way from railcar to railcar in hopes of stopping the train and getting home. During each adventure she must deal with personal issues of her own and of other "passengers". That was the first season at least, I'm not sure if the second season is going to deal with someone else. Either way this show is absolute fire and given how it's a miniseries, there is zero excuse to avoid it. Unless of course you're some basic adult who still thinks about The Wire.



I don't like Adult Swim cartoons because they try too hard while not trying at all. BUT Primal is a gruesome, violent, visually captivating cartoon made by Genndy Tartakovsky (the guy who made Dexter's Laboratory, Sym-Bionic Titan and Samurai Jack). It's a silent cartoon where the key theme is man vs nature, and in the most visually captivating way you can imagine. There are some lighthearted moments and such, but this is really illustrating Tartakovsky's mastery with using lighting and shadows to produce atmosphere and tension.



One of the biggest woke cartoon hits of the decade, courtesy of one of the best people who worked on Adventure Time, Rebecca Sugar. It's a wonderful adventure show that's a mixture of fighting, character development and lore expansion. It's also notable because it deals with very progressive LGBTQ themes, something that I appreciated (note: I'm a cisgendered male but I will always support representation for all). The show proper concluded but it looks like Cartoon Network is still eager to pump out more SU stuff in the form of time skipped stories taking place in the future of the timeline, so that should be very nice to see in the upcoming decade too.



Three bears are roommates and have adventures (either together or individually). This show made me feel things man. The lighthearted episodes have the ability to make me feel very happy and the humor in this show is pretty good when it hits. The more serious episodes centered on things that happened in the past also touched me and made me feel somber. This show is one of my "go-to's" for how cartoons in the 2010's are so much better than cartoons ever were in the history of the medium, how they managed to get so much from three cutesy looking bears I'll never know.



I LOVE the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, and yes, that includes the cartoon series that ran on Cartoon Network. DoB is a cartoon that takes place between the events in the first HtTYD movie and the second one. Obviously nothing really happens except for Hiccup growing a little physically as the story really doesn't kick off until the actual second movie, but this is still a fun show regardless. Also heads up, there's going to be a sequel cartoon set to take place after the third movie, which I am super looking forward to.


Honorable Cartoon Network Mentions: Sym-Bionic Titan, Young Justice, The Amazing World of Gumball, Clarence, Craig of the Creek, Summer Camp Island, Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart, Victor and Valentino


Disney Channel actually stepped up their animated programming this past decade. Even though I went with Cartoon Network first, two of these Disney shows I'm about to share are my favorites from the entire decade.



I've already devoted an entire post to this cartoon. It's probably my favorite 2010's cartoon and is easily the best Disney show ever in my book. This is another cartoon that I think Adventure Time really set things up to succeed, because this too was a cartoon where each individual episode served to set up characters, expand the lore, and gradually lead to the final climax. Of course Star vs' more obvious predecessor would be...



Out of all of the shows I'll list today, THIS IS THE ONE YOU SHOULD SEE. The creativity and imagination in this cartoon is unlike anything Disney's made before, and something Disney will probably never make again because they can just rest their laurels on owning the property rights of various intellectual properties. But, yeah this show was super good. A cartoon with hidden messages and codes in every episode that made you eagerly wait for the next. It's also set in the Pacific Northwest (Portlandia?) which is a breath of fresh air because most shows are either set in LA, New York or a dystopian wasteland.



"Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong." - Murphy's law.
This cartoon is about a kid named Milo (voiced by Weird Al Yankovic!), who is basically Eugene from Hey Arnold! and just has the worst luck ever. Despite that he is very positive and chipper and thinks about the positives in every situation. I like that contrast and it really helps ease the overly chipperness of the character in a way that other happy go lucky characters like SpongeBob SquarePants can't.



It's weird to call Star Wars a Disney cartoon but, welp, here we are. Every time a new Star Wars movie comes out it becomes painfully clear that most people did not watch Rebels or Clone Wars. I think that's a shame but it doesn't take away from how much I loved Rebels. No it's not as good as Clone Wars, but it was good for what it was and I think it helped give Disney a nice way to set up the birth of the group that would later become the Rebel Alliance in the OG trilogy. An area that was a garbage fire in the Expanded Universe.



On one hand this art style is too weeb inspired for my taste. On the other hand, it's more Star Wars animation and I will take that any day of the week. Resistance takes place LONG after Rebels or Clone Wars as it takes place roughly around The Force Awakens. Or maybe after. Either way Poe Dameron is there a few times.


Honorable Disney Channel Mentions: Wander Over Yonder, Amphibia, Tron: Uprising


Nickelodeon's cartoons in the 2010's weren't very good as the channel relied far too heavily on SpongeBob SquarePants to carry it and failed to let anything else breathe.



But one of the few that I liked was Harvey Beaks, created by C.H. Greenblatt, the guy who made Chowder in the late 2000's. It's cute, it's touching, and it's a nice fun little "childhood cartoon" type story that makes the adult in me cry.


Honorable Nickelodeon Mention: The Loud House


I won't watch your stupid live action stuff Netflix, but I will watch your cartoons.



Next to Steven Universe this is probably the only show my readers have ever heard of. You all know it probably because it's on Netflix and because Keith Olbermann was on it. I know it because Amy Winfrey worked on it. Mrs. Winfrey created Making Fiends, one of my all time favorite cartoons. I do appreciate animation made for adults so long as it's got a purpose. This cartoon met that criteria.



Creative, imaginative, awesome. Simply awesome.



Ah yes a reboot done right. The original 80's cartoons (like all 80's cartoons) was dogshit, but this reboot does the story justice. A warrior princess with powers must defeat an evil villain. Classic. Also this makes me think a studio should remake Sailor Moon.



Hear me out, the Power Rangers but the show is actually good this time.



The Simpsons and Futurama creator Matt Groening's newest offering is this funny fantasy show. An alcoholic princess has some pretty intense adventures. I think this is the most inspired a Gorening cartoon's been in a while.



Big Hero 6 if the main human was a girl and wanted to murder her classmates.


Honorable Netflix Mentions: 12 Forever, various other cartoons that only lasted a season


These are cartoons that don't have a major channel or streaming service backing them. At least not yet.



Following the tragic passing of Edd Gould, his closest family and friends kept his online cartoon going well into the mid 2010's as part of Eddsworld Legacy with a ton of videos. All of which are fantastic. We miss you Edd.



I don't care for Game of Thrones but I absolutely love Bleacher Report's NBA parody of it. It's an absolute shame that this upcoming season will be the last season of GoZ.



Another Bleacher Report original, this time a weekly cartoon about the chaos that happens in the NFL.



This is a pilot developed by Vivienne Medrano. It's twisted, it's nice, I think it has a lot of potential.


Honorable Web Cartoon Mention: The Champions

And there you have it. The only correct list of what was the best television programming the 2010's had to offer.

Here's to more wonderful stuff from this unappreciated medium in the next decade!


As always thanks for stopping by and please watch some more animated movies and shows that you've never heard of, there's so much good stuff out there today.

Take care.

So after my trip to Japan I brought back a big stack of cards. There were so many cards in that stack that I had no idea where to start when blogging about them. So instead of condensing them all into a big post (which most of you will only read a quarter of), I decided to blog about them at a rate of three cards at a time. Maybe some of them will make for interesting material, maybe they won't. Let's find out.

Today's post is going to be a wee bit different. I'm going to be featuring three different packs with a combined total of five cards within them.


I found that Japanese grocery stores still carry some unique stuff like these cards that come with gum (novel concept right?). The reigning king of this genre of card+gum products over in Japan appears to be a company called enSKY.

These packs usually have like one or two clear acetate cards max inside with some gum. The gum is sweet and nice but the flavor only lasts like five seconds and you spit it out. The real prize is the card anyway.


Might as well start off with a character some who are in the know are aware of, Hatsune Miku. A virtual CGI anime girl who does live shows using hologram technology and people actually pay to attend her "concerts". I've listened to her stuff and it's electronica that doesn't have much in terms of substance but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't catchy.


Anyway the pack above is a Clear Card Collection Gum 5, I assume that means this is series five of a long series. Japan's collecting culture is a whole other animal, if you don't pay attention you will lose track of the stuff in a flash. There are 54 total cards in this set and this pack features two of them, though be warned that the two you get may not be the ones shown on the package.


I don't care for anime/manga, all of these years of western weaboos asking me if I've seen "such and such anime" the second after I tell them I'm of Japanese ancestry have made me dislike it. But I will be the first to admit that the art-style can look incredible in stills like the one above. The scan didn't pick up on it but this card is somehow shiny with three different layers of sparkles despite being a thin acetate card. No I do not know how enSky accomplished this, but I am in awe all the same.


The backs on all of the cards we'll see in this post are like this in that they aren't really clear. But I have noticed that the closer you bring it to a light or lamp, the more clear and defined the picture gets.


Here is a "chibi" version of one of Miku's friends, "Meiko". Chibi is basically just a way of drawing a character in a cuter form with an even bigger/more exaggerated head and smaller body proportions. Also no noses. Ever. Noses aren't cute.



Next up is a pack of Uma Musume Clear Card Collection Gum. This is part of the Uma Musume Pretty Derby franchise which is a popular mobile app game. It's about cute anime girls who want to be the best horse girls in the world. Uma musume translates to horse daughter BTW (yes, I know that musume also translates to girl in some instances, go away weebs).


Much like the Hatsune Miku pack before, this is made by enSKY and denotes that there is a full 54 card set and that this pack only features two of them.


Here's a chibi version of a character I assume. Apparently this character is ready to have a workout from hell at the gym.


I assume that this "El Condor Pasa" is not the Peruvian folk song or the Simon & Garfunkel song inspired by the Peruvian folk song, and merely a character in this franchise.



The third and last pack we'll be looking at today is from Fate/Extra: Last Encore. Fate/Extra is a role-playing video game franchise and this Last Encore thing was an anime adaption made in 2018. I couldn't really tell you much about the game/show since I'm not familiar with it, I know there's fighting involved and I think there's a character who has conveniently lost their memories and must now fight in some unknown virtual universe while they try to piece back parts of their past. Sure, great that's not totally generic at all.


This is going to be different from the first two packs because it states that the set itself only has 18 cards and that this pack only has one card inside. Also unlike the first two packs that were completely concealed and hidden, this pack is in a clear cellophane pack.


Despite the ponytail I'm pretty sure this is a dude.

So anyway this was a look into the world of Japanese non-sports cards that can be found at supermarkets for like 108 yen (aprox $1 USD) each.


Also, I just want to end this post by showing how the gum is packaged. enSKY clearly did their homework and learned from where Topps and Fleer did shit when they packaged cards with gum. These are cleanly packaged in plastic wrapping (that's recyclable too!). No bug-proof powders necessary. No risk of the sugar in the gum staining the card.

My motherland, they do it right.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

The year is 2005, I'm eleven years old and I walk into a CVS Pharmacy with a parental guardian and notice something hanging on the same rack that housed the playing cards.

I don't have a picture of it but it was 2005 Topps Series 2.

While it wasn't the first pack of cards I had ever opened, it was the first pack of baseball cards I had ever bought/asked my parent to buy for me (the other "first packs" were B-Day presents and the like). It was just one and I wasn't really going in with any real idea of what I "want" inside the pack. Just that I wanted the pack and to open it to see what was inside.

Over half of the real contents of the inside will be lost to time but four cards have survived being my possession forever. One could argue that they also were what started my Yankees fandom.

The First Notable Card:



Yup, a Core Five member front and center. "Hey, it's someone I actually know!" I thought. At the time this card seemed super cool to me. I mean Posada's in action and this was during a hot streak where every single Topps flagship card made of Posada showed him in catching gear. You can see how an eleven year old doofus with no real affiliation with cards prior would find this cool.


One thing I didn't like though was that the numbers on the back (the card numbers) weren't jersey numbers. At the time I was a dumb kid who thought that the jersey number deserved to be acknowledged somewhere on the card. I scanned all over the card looking for any hint of Posada's number but never found it. I found out it was 20 in 2013.

In the past I've lamented how I didn't have a favorite player growing up. There's an alternate universe out there where Posada might have actually been that guy for me given how I had the dumb kid strategy of "he's the first player I got a baseball card of!". But then a few days later a friend of mine named Arthur told me that Posada was his favorite player and my dumb kid brain thought "wait, we're all supposed to like different players, I can't like the same player he likes!" so I scrapped considering Posada my favorite. I tried going with Hideki Matsui or Ichiro Suzuki for a while but because I didn't pull their cards in my first ever pack of cards they'd never be good enough. Eventually I just stopped trying to pretend I was into baseball and threw out any sense of fandom beyond a casual "I guess I like the Yankees" attitude until 2010.

Note, by 2019 Kenny would go on to consider some guy who was NINE when 2005 Topps Series 2 came out to be his all time favorite. And refer to himself in the third person for no real reason on occasion.

So while Posada might've been a good/bad starting point, what really cemented me casually calling the Yankees "my team" would be the rest of the pack.

The Second Card:



Yes, back to back Yankees. In the same pack. This was destiny I thought, two Yankees! Stanton wasn't nearly as good or famous as Posada so I wasn't going to declare him a favorite, and it was the right call because by the time I got in baseball there emerged another guy named Mike Stanton who'd eventually be referred to as Giancarlo Stanton.

But were two Yankees enough to convince someone as passive as me into making a major commitment?

The Third Card:



Back-to-back-to-back Yankees. In the same pack. Alright, sure give me that navy blue Yankees cap it's a done deal now.
Even though Womack was like Stanton (in that I didn't know who the hell he was) 11 year old me was very impressed that I got three Yankees in a pack. This is tops (get it?), you have no choice, go Yankees.

At this point I was just wondering how long the streak would continue.

The Fourth Card:



A mixed emotion of joy and somberness overtook 11 year old Kenny. Here came Piazza making a late recruitment pitch to come root for the New York Mets. And Piazza was also someone I knew about because living in New York in the mid 2000's meant that it was all Piazza all the time (whenever it wasn't Jeter/A-Rod all the time). It might mean something!

Unfortunately by this point the damage was done, I like Piazza and all but the Yankees had already clinched my fandom. It's like the elections in France, whoever meets the threshold first wins. Here in 2019 I can say with 100% certainty that this was the correct move. I have nothing against the Mets but, damn do they need help.

The only other card I remember getting in the rest of the pack was 653, the Milwaukee Brewers team card. I don't have it anymore but it sticks out in my mind because I remember showing it to a friend of mine named Chris who was like "check it out, Kenny has the whole Brewers team" and then another friend J.R. was like "who cares, they suck".


I'd love to go in depth with the rest of the pack but as I said earlier, the rest of the pack disappeared into the sands of time. Apparently I did manage to get a Matt Holliday in there, something I'd forgotten about until I looked to see if anything survived. All I really remember was telling myself that I'd be a Seattle Mariners fan if I pulled an Ichiro Suzuki in the pack. I never did and in a way that was also a blessing in disguise because the Mariners are bad and should be ashamed of wasting the entirety of Ichiro's prime years in the states. Also I think I might've pulled two nondescript San Diego Padres out of that pack. Hmm...


I imagine that there's an alternative world where I didn't end up turning into a Yankees appreciator of sorts through this pack. Maybe I pulled a ton of Los Angeles Dodgers and ended up as a Dodger fan in New York state. Maybe I might've gotten super into the hobby/sports way earlier than during my peak pot smoking years in high school. There are a lot of "what ifs" at play here. However that doesn't change how the chips fell where they did and you all have me as I am now, a weirdo with virtually zero childhood memories of collecting or sports, offering you my takes from this perspective.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).